Stutterer
05-10-2004, 02:42 AM
An only child, and a stutterer, Updike began to express himself in stories on his mother’s typewriter when he was 11.
Updike remains fascinated by favorite topic: Himself
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post
BOSTON – The Grayed American Writer is walking ...
No. The writer is strolling.
No. Ambling. That’s the precise word. John Updike is ambling down Blossom Street in Boston. It is Patriot’s Day and Boston Marathon day and the banks are closed.
But the world is wide open and full of possibilities.
An amiable sun shines down. Clad in khakis, plaid sports jacket and a crayon-yellow turtleneck, Updike, arguably among the most talented living writers in the world, has a toothy smile on his red face. His hair is gray-white.
He is amused: At the past. At the present. At the country. At long races. At short stories. At human foibles of all colors.
But most of all Updike is amused at his amut. He is endlessly fascinated by his own self, which he has explored and exploited in more than 50 books in the past 50 years.
His latest is a collection, “The Early Stories: 1953-1975.” For this, he received the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Though he’s 72, this is not a lifetime achievement award. He still has books to write. As long as he is walking and smiling and breathing, he will have something to write about. He’s a marathoner.
As he takes a seat in Foster’s, a bar and cafe on the first floor of the Holiday Inn Government Center, he drops a brown folder onto the nearby windowsill. Its innards are a secret he will later reveal, he says. Surely it’s something he’s written. Surely it’s something about himself.
The eyes are hazel. And pale. And watery. He’s just come from the eye doctor. He goes to doctors often.
“I have so-called little lesions under my eyes,” he says. Pre-cancerous, he adds.
And he has extremely bushy white eyebrows. The bristles poke into his eyes.
It is because he sees so well that he writes so beautifully.
“Writing is a way of taming the world,” he says, “turning the inchoate, often embarrassing stream into a package.” It’s a construct that enables him to remain amused, and amazed. Putting the world on the page has made a good living for him and for countless professors around the world who teach his books.
He adds that writing “does make the world realer to me.”
An only child, and a stutterer, Updike began to express himself in stories on his mother’s typewriter when he was 11. He grew up in Shillington, Pa., an hour or so northwest of Philadelphia. His father was a teacher. His mother worked in a department store.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1954, he accepted a fellowship to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. While there, the New Yorker offered him a slot as a staff writer. He moved with his wife, Mary, to Manhattan. They stayed in New York less than two years, then moved to Ipswich, just north of Boston. They have four grown children.
He has won a couple of National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes. He is perhaps most renowned for his series of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. In the first one, “Rabbit, Run,” Angstrom is a former athlete and a young husband who feels trapped in his marriage and his dead-end life. He goes out for cigarettes one night and keeps going. Updike follows Angstrom’s search for meaning in several subsequent novels.
Updike admits that if you take Rabbit out of his oeuvre, he would have few literary prizes and less praise.
Updike is a dinosaur. He’s a throwback to another era when writers wrote and didn’t teach or act in movies or star on TV.
He marvels that on the one hand people are reading less, but on the other they’re writing more.
In separate essays, Tom Wolfe called Updike “insular, effete and irrelevant” and David Foster Wallace asked whether he has “ever had one unpublished thought?”
Updike’s answer to Wallace is: Yes. But, of course, there is still time.
“People may have liked me better if I had written less,” says the master of over-honest introspection. Updike writes a lot – short stories and book reviews and art criticism and novels. “I like seeing my name in print,” he says.
Over the years, Updike’s brain has undergone a strange shift. Through constant fictional confession and the blurring of fact and myth, many of his memories have been supplanted by his memoirs. He recalls one particular trip he made to New York when he was young. His recollection is more of the story he wrote about the visit than of the visit itself. “Having written the story,” he says, “totally displaces what really happened that day.”
If the unexamined life is not worth living, what can you say of the over-examined life? That it’s worth sharing?
He touches his splotchy skin every now and then as he talks.
“I might have drifted into some ordinary job but for the psoriasis,” he says. He wrote about his chronic condition, natch, in an essay titled: “At War With My Skin.”
He included the essay, natch, in his memoir “Self-Consciousness.”
The skin problem made his commitment to writing “more fierce,” he says, because he needed as much time as possible to sit on the beach and let the sun burn the itching away.
Updike seems easy in his skin this day. He plays a little golf, and he has served as a marshal at a Ryder Cup match and the U.S. Open. He lives in Beverly, Mass., now, with his second wife, Martha.
Writing regrets? He has a few. The original Rabbit novels, for instance, were written too fast and contained some factual errors. He has tried to fix the errors in subsequent editions.
Mostly he is pleased with his writing life. He has another novel coming out in the fall. “I’m reading proofs now,” he says. “That’s what’s in the brown folder.”
And on this Boston Marathon day, he is thinking about the long run. He glances over his shoulder at the television above the bar. He watches the end of the race and an interview with the winner.
Now it’s time for Updike to run. He reaches for the folder and tucks it under his arm. The working title of the novel is “Villages.” It’s a story about an aging computer programmer, he says, and about “a life’s education via the towns you live in.”
By education, he means a philosophical construct to help us stay amused and amazed in this strange and changing world. By towns, he means places like Shillington, Pa., Ipswich and Beverly.
And by you, he doesn’t mean you, of course. He means Updike.
Updike remains fascinated by favorite topic: Himself
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post
BOSTON – The Grayed American Writer is walking ...
No. The writer is strolling.
No. Ambling. That’s the precise word. John Updike is ambling down Blossom Street in Boston. It is Patriot’s Day and Boston Marathon day and the banks are closed.
But the world is wide open and full of possibilities.
An amiable sun shines down. Clad in khakis, plaid sports jacket and a crayon-yellow turtleneck, Updike, arguably among the most talented living writers in the world, has a toothy smile on his red face. His hair is gray-white.
He is amused: At the past. At the present. At the country. At long races. At short stories. At human foibles of all colors.
But most of all Updike is amused at his amut. He is endlessly fascinated by his own self, which he has explored and exploited in more than 50 books in the past 50 years.
His latest is a collection, “The Early Stories: 1953-1975.” For this, he received the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Though he’s 72, this is not a lifetime achievement award. He still has books to write. As long as he is walking and smiling and breathing, he will have something to write about. He’s a marathoner.
As he takes a seat in Foster’s, a bar and cafe on the first floor of the Holiday Inn Government Center, he drops a brown folder onto the nearby windowsill. Its innards are a secret he will later reveal, he says. Surely it’s something he’s written. Surely it’s something about himself.
The eyes are hazel. And pale. And watery. He’s just come from the eye doctor. He goes to doctors often.
“I have so-called little lesions under my eyes,” he says. Pre-cancerous, he adds.
And he has extremely bushy white eyebrows. The bristles poke into his eyes.
It is because he sees so well that he writes so beautifully.
“Writing is a way of taming the world,” he says, “turning the inchoate, often embarrassing stream into a package.” It’s a construct that enables him to remain amused, and amazed. Putting the world on the page has made a good living for him and for countless professors around the world who teach his books.
He adds that writing “does make the world realer to me.”
An only child, and a stutterer, Updike began to express himself in stories on his mother’s typewriter when he was 11. He grew up in Shillington, Pa., an hour or so northwest of Philadelphia. His father was a teacher. His mother worked in a department store.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1954, he accepted a fellowship to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. While there, the New Yorker offered him a slot as a staff writer. He moved with his wife, Mary, to Manhattan. They stayed in New York less than two years, then moved to Ipswich, just north of Boston. They have four grown children.
He has won a couple of National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes. He is perhaps most renowned for his series of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. In the first one, “Rabbit, Run,” Angstrom is a former athlete and a young husband who feels trapped in his marriage and his dead-end life. He goes out for cigarettes one night and keeps going. Updike follows Angstrom’s search for meaning in several subsequent novels.
Updike admits that if you take Rabbit out of his oeuvre, he would have few literary prizes and less praise.
Updike is a dinosaur. He’s a throwback to another era when writers wrote and didn’t teach or act in movies or star on TV.
He marvels that on the one hand people are reading less, but on the other they’re writing more.
In separate essays, Tom Wolfe called Updike “insular, effete and irrelevant” and David Foster Wallace asked whether he has “ever had one unpublished thought?”
Updike’s answer to Wallace is: Yes. But, of course, there is still time.
“People may have liked me better if I had written less,” says the master of over-honest introspection. Updike writes a lot – short stories and book reviews and art criticism and novels. “I like seeing my name in print,” he says.
Over the years, Updike’s brain has undergone a strange shift. Through constant fictional confession and the blurring of fact and myth, many of his memories have been supplanted by his memoirs. He recalls one particular trip he made to New York when he was young. His recollection is more of the story he wrote about the visit than of the visit itself. “Having written the story,” he says, “totally displaces what really happened that day.”
If the unexamined life is not worth living, what can you say of the over-examined life? That it’s worth sharing?
He touches his splotchy skin every now and then as he talks.
“I might have drifted into some ordinary job but for the psoriasis,” he says. He wrote about his chronic condition, natch, in an essay titled: “At War With My Skin.”
He included the essay, natch, in his memoir “Self-Consciousness.”
The skin problem made his commitment to writing “more fierce,” he says, because he needed as much time as possible to sit on the beach and let the sun burn the itching away.
Updike seems easy in his skin this day. He plays a little golf, and he has served as a marshal at a Ryder Cup match and the U.S. Open. He lives in Beverly, Mass., now, with his second wife, Martha.
Writing regrets? He has a few. The original Rabbit novels, for instance, were written too fast and contained some factual errors. He has tried to fix the errors in subsequent editions.
Mostly he is pleased with his writing life. He has another novel coming out in the fall. “I’m reading proofs now,” he says. “That’s what’s in the brown folder.”
And on this Boston Marathon day, he is thinking about the long run. He glances over his shoulder at the television above the bar. He watches the end of the race and an interview with the winner.
Now it’s time for Updike to run. He reaches for the folder and tucks it under his arm. The working title of the novel is “Villages.” It’s a story about an aging computer programmer, he says, and about “a life’s education via the towns you live in.”
By education, he means a philosophical construct to help us stay amused and amazed in this strange and changing world. By towns, he means places like Shillington, Pa., Ipswich and Beverly.
And by you, he doesn’t mean you, of course. He means Updike.